Rosetta makes its reappearance at just the right time for me. The spacecraft, making its second Earth swing-by on November 13, will use its gravity assists past Earth and Mars to reach Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, deploying a lander onto the nucleus and spending two years orbiting the comet. The close approach produced the memorable image below. I thought I was too under the weather today to post anything, but Rosetta's composite shot of Earth by night offers a short, memorable subject. Look at those city lights! Image: This is a composite of four images combined to show the illuminated crescent of Earth and the cities of the northern hemisphere. The images were acquired with the OSIRIS Wide Angle Camera during Rosetta's second Earth swing-by on Nov. 13. This image showing islands of light created by human habitation was taken with the OSIRIS WAC at 19:45 CET, about 2 hours before the closest approach of the spacecraft to Earth. At the time, Rosetta was about 80,000 km...

About the only thing that went wrong on my Washington DC trip (noted earlier here) was having to fight a persistent head cold and trying to avoid shaking hands with our eminent panelists so as not to contaminate them (I want these guys healthy, and working!). But the fates smiled Wednesday morning when I moderated "The Future of the Vision for Space Exploration," my voice back from what had been near-laryngitis the evening before, and we had a fascinating discussion in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill talking about where space exploration is going and what policy decisions loom large at the moment. Louis Friedman, executive director of The Planetary Society, presented a look at current projects to explore the Solar System, many of which are somewhat off our radar, including Indian lunar missions like Chandrayaan-1 and the Chinese lunar orbiter Chang'e I (images expected by the end of this month). Japan's space activities beyond the ongoing Hayabusa asteroid return...

By Larry Klaes Tau Zero journalist Larry Klaes looks at Jon Lomberg's stunning Galaxy Garden in Hawaii. Lomberg told Larry that working on the garden had made him appreciate on a primal level just how many objects there are in even a 'small' section of the Milky Way. So there's one answer to the Fermi Paradox: If extraterrestrial civilizations are out there, maybe they're simply too busy exploring to have gotten around to us! There is a galaxy on Hawaii. Not an actual galaxy, of course, as a typical island of stars contains many billions of suns and spans hundreds of thousands of light years. The galaxy residing on the largest of that particular chain of Pacific islands is a 100-foot wide living representation of the vast stellar realm our planet and humanity dwells in, the Milky Way. Called the Galaxy Garden, the idea for this unique project began about eight years ago in the mind of artist Jon Lomberg, who worked with Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan on his Cosmos PBS...

When we think interstellar, the possibility of a sudden breakthrough offering quick travel -- Epsilon Eridani in an afternoon -- often dominates the debate. But the second path to the stars is the more gradual migration approach that Gregory Matloff, Les Johnson and the artist C Bangs talk about in their Living Off the Land in Space (New York: Copernicus, 2007). As discussed in this article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the trio made their case at NYC College of Technology/CUNY on Thursday evening, leading off not with a starship but a prairie schooner. The point is trenchant: How can we leverage and extend existing technologies to get us into deep space without breakthroughs in physics? "In going into space, we need to think differently. All of these technologies we describe in our book could be done today," says Johnson (NASA MSFC), who manages the agency's Space Science Programs and Projects Office. Technologies such as solar sails, their great historical precedent being the...

Emily Lakdawalla is hosting the 28th Carnival of Space at her Planetary Society weblog, a compilation including plenty of coverage on Comet Holmes, the unusually active object that, New Scientist opines, may have suffered a collision with an asteroid. Intriguing speculation, though Centauri Dreams readers will probably find Music of the Spheres' entry on 55 Cancri the most interstellar-minded. Bruce looks at the similarities between that system's new planet and Allen Steele's Coyote. From the novel of the same name, it's a moon orbiting a giant planet in its star's habitable zone, a scenario tantalizingly similar to the recent discovery.

More notes on the 'wandering planet' scenario advanced by John Debes (Carnegie Institution of Washington) and Steinn Sigurðsson (Penn State), which suggests that planets ejected from their stars as their solar systems formed could conceivably keep enough internal heat to maintain an atmosphere and sustain a liquid ocean under ice. Debes' simulations show that a planet with a large moon could survive the ejection process. Noting that between four and five percent of the simulations the duo ran on an Earth-mass planet with Luna-like companion resulted in the 'Earth-Moon system surviving, Debes had this to say in an article in Sky & Telescope: "Anytime something happens in astronomy a few percent of the time, it is interesting to us because on the grand scale of things, it means it's happening a lot and people should probably know about it." Interesting indeed, because a large moon means tidal energies between moon and planet that could cause the interior of the planet to warm. Debes...